Run for you
The work run for you rather than delivered to you, across both IT and security, by people who already know what your compliance programme has to prove.
An MSP keeps the estate working. An MSSP watches for the attacker. Buying them from two suppliers leaves a seam between them, and leaves the evidence both of them generate somewhere nobody looks until an audit is three weeks out.
What that coversWhat we do
Running the estate day to day: identity and directory administration, endpoint management and patching, backup verification, monitoring, and the routine work that keeps things current. Scoped to an agreed service level rather than to a ticket count, because volume measures how much is going wrong rather than how well it is handled.
See also: IT Services
Security monitoring and response: log collection, alert triage, investigation, and containment when something is real. The value is in triage rather than in the tooling. A service that forwards every alert has moved the problem to you rather than taken it on.
Endpoint and identity detection with the authority to act, agreed in advance: isolate a host, disable an account, kill a session. What we may do without calling you first is written into the agreement, because the middle of an incident is the wrong time to discover nobody has that authority.
The assessment cycle run as a service rather than as a series of engagements: recurring assessment, triage against your environment, and remediation tracked to closed. The same method as the standalone service, operated continuously.
See also: Vulnerability Assessment
Both halves of a managed service generate exactly what an assessor asks for: patch records, access reviews, monitoring coverage, incident handling. Producing it continuously rather than reconstructing it under deadline is the single largest reason to buy IT and security management from a firm that also does your readiness work.
See also: Compliance Readiness
A managed service is the tier that handles the routine and knows when something is not routine. When it is not, the people who do the testing, the architecture, and the compliance work are in the same firm rather than at the other end of a referral.
See also: vCISO & Embedded Experts
Process
What is covered, what is not, response targets, and the hours those targets apply in. Written down in specific terms, because the gap between what a client assumed was covered and what was actually contracted is where these arrangements sour.
Inventory the estate, deploy tooling, establish log sources, and document what normal looks like. Detection is measured against a baseline, and without one the first months produce noise rather than findings.
What we may do unilaterally during an incident and what needs a call first, decided while nobody is under pressure.
Day-to-day administration and monitoring at the agreed level, with the evidence trail accumulating as a by-product rather than as a separate task.
Regular reporting against the service levels, plus what changed in the estate and what that means for the programme. A managed service that never reports upward becomes invisible until it fails.
Deliverables
Every engagement produces documentation you can hand to an auditor, a customer, or your own board without translating it first.
The first conversation is about coverage: what you need watched, in what hours, and what you want us authorised to do without asking.